Bill Gates on Health Care

$100M for AIDS research; focus on poor countries

Business leaders and governments should step up their efforts in the battle against AIDS, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told participants at the World Economic Forum. Gates, who last week gave a further $100 million to help the efforts to contain AIDS,
spoke of his horror that only 2% of funds handed over by philanthropists went from rich countries to poor ones.

He said that when he gave $50 million to research on the killer disease malaria, he was told that he was doubling the funds available.
“That’s the most terrible thing I’ve heard. It’s outrageous how little is put into research on malaria,” Gates said. It was lucky AIDS was present in the rich world, said Gates, otherwise the resources being devoted to finding a vaccine for the pandemic
would be even lower.

Meanwhile, a United Nations population expert predicted a “fatality avalanche” from AIDS and said that so far, every prediction of the scale of AIDS deaths has proved a serious underestimate.